Note that this will only work if data is at the end of the struct, otherwise there is no contiguous memory to allocate data. If I swap the order of the elements to:

struct __attribute__((packed)) BabelPacket
{
unsigned senderId;
char data[0]; // I changed this to char in order to use strcpy
unsigned dataLength;
};

the output of the code above (instead of "kappa"), would be "a".

A more reliable way if you are determined to use C-arrays would be to assume a maximum number of elements and preallocate the array, i.e.:

#include <iostream>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#define MAX_NUMBER_OF_CHARACTERS 5 // Many ways to do this, I defined the macro for the purposes of this example
struct __attribute__((packed)) BabelPacket
{
unsigned senderId;
// I changed this to char in order to use strcpy. Allocate the
// max number + 1 element for the termination string
char data[MAX_NUMBER_OF_CHARACTERS+1];
unsigned dataLength;
};
int main(){
BabelPacket *packet = reinterpret_cast<BabelPacket *>(new char[sizeof(BabelPacket) + 5]);
packet->senderId = 1;
packet->dataLength = 5;
if (dataLength>MAX_NUMBER_OF_CHARACTERS){
std::cout<<"String greater than the maximum number of characters"<<std::endl;
}
// Copy the string. Add NULL character at the end of
// the string to indicate its end
strcpy(packet->data, "kappa\0");
// Verify that the string is copied properly
for (int i=0;i<packet->dataLength;++i){
std::cout<<packet->data[i];
}
std::cout<<std::endl;
return 0;
}

This code produces the correct output, and protects you against violations. As you can see, it can get messy pretty quickly, which is why I would recommend to use std::vector for this. The dataLength may then be retrieved automatically as the size of the vector, and you are always protected against overflows.